Fresh Crater Revealing Buried Ice

Recent small craters discovered by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter expose buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars. This ice is a record of past climate change. Not stable today, it was deposited during a period of different obliquity, or tilt, of the planet's axis.

This image is one product from HiRISE observation ESP_011337_2360 . Other image products from this observation are available at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_011337_2360. (Image: ESP_011337_2360; (Reference: Byrne et al., 2009)